The Obama administration is setting a pretty low bar for Obamacare enrollment, putting up a goal of 10 million people to have coverage by the end of next year.
The administration said Thursday that projections expect 14 million people to sign up for Obamacare, but only 9 to 11 million people would have coverage by the end of 2016. This is due to people dropping out or not paying premiums.
So the administration has set the goal of 10 million to have coverage. That is about the same amount of enrollees who have paid for Obamacare now.
“We believe 10 million is a strong and realistic goal,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell. “We’ve seen high levels of satisfaction with the marketplace and expect the vast majority of our current customers will re-enroll. And our target assumes that more than one out of every four of the eligible uninsured will select plans.”
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The open enrollment projection is far below the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s projection of about 21 million people.
The low enrollment projection reflects a wide range of factors, the administration said.
The administration expects that 7.3 to 8.8 million people who had marketplace coverage in 2015 will select plans or automatically re-enroll for 2016. Then up to nearly 4 million uninsured people will select plans during open enrollment.
In addition, more than 1 million people who have individual plans but are not enrolled in Obamacare also will sign up. Obamacare represents a majority of the individual market, which is for people who do not get health coverage from their job.
The total of all of those projections mean that up to 14 million people will enroll in the marketplace in 2016 open enrollment.
The administration said that it believes that it will see customers drop coverage for a variety of reasons. These include getting coverage from a job, becoming eligible for Medicare or Medicaid, or moving out of state.
The administration projects that by the end of 2016 between 9.4 and 11.4 million people will have coverage. Therefore, it made the goal right in the middle of that projection.
Open enrollment starts Nov. 1 and ends in January.
